


silver bullets on their tongues

by saintsurvivor



Series: silver bullets 'verse [1]
Category: Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)
Genre: Eggsy as Guinevere, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Kingsman is terrified of Eggsy, Manipulation, Minor Character Death, Threat of Skinning, Torture, Victoria Winslow is Arthur, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-16
Updated: 2015-08-16
Packaged: 2018-04-15 00:31:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4586139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saintsurvivor/pseuds/saintsurvivor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Merlin thinks Eggsy Unwin is the monster that Kingsman was always afraid they’d make.</p><p>or,<br/>eggsy extracts information from his mark without laying a hand on him until he kills him</p>
            </blockquote>





	silver bullets on their tongues

**Author's Note:**

  * For [poziomeczka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/poziomeczka/gifts).



# silver bullets on their tongue

> for [bendovereggsy](http://tmblr.co/mJkNI_U7V8b4ZS0hXzudynw) 

Eggsy Unwin, Kingsman finds out, is a balancing act in the worst way.

He is, in a dichotomy of his usual warm and loving personality, clinical violence and methodical recklessness, that leaves more people than needed dead and oh, how _ruthless_ dear Guinevere can be.

He is an exercise in sheer terror.

Many a time as a handler come up to Merlin with a quiet request to not work with Eggsy anymore, even _Agents_ have been known to come and ask Merlin to not pair them up with Eggsy, at least not alone if they truly have to work with him.

Merlin is used to violence, used to the gore and the blood at the back your mouth and beneath your fingernails, is used to going back home with ghosts in your lungs and blood in your brain.

He is used to how agents can take the more unsavory bits of their work into themselves after tears in the field, especially if they’ve been undercover for long stretches of time with little contact with Kingsman or someone else besides the company they are infiltrating.

But Eggsy, _Guinevere_ , scares him.

Maybe because Merlin knows that Eggsy is not exactly a byproduct of Kingsman. He has been like this since many years before, molded by violence in childhood, crafted with crude beauty with fists and words and threats, until he was nothing more than rough edges, left coldly serene in the face of blackness.

The only thing Kingsman has ever done for this lad, Merlin thinks, is smooth his rough edges until they shine beautifully like stained glass, but split skin like steel.

“ _Now, luv,”_ Guinevere’s voice comes loud and clear over the comms. He leans over, glasses set on the side so they offer a clear view of both Guinevere and his unfortunate mark, whose all but shaking in his bonds. “ _I need yer to tell me everythin’ yer know, and believe me, I’ll know if yer leave anythin’ out,”_

That’s also a special skill of Eggsy’s, Merlin thinks. He’s a human lie detector, Merlin doesn’t know how, sometimes thinks he doesn’t want to _know_ how, but it’s inhuman almost, _unnatural_.

He wonders why Victoria Winslow kept Eggsy on when she became Arthur.

Possibly because Victoria saw herself in Eggsy. Something in that is far more terrifying.

“ _I don’t know anything!”_ The man on the screen shrieks, blood matting his brown hair, blue eyes roving madly in his sockets even as he seeks to keep Eggsy in his line of sight. Eggsy has stripped him down to his boxers, and he’s shivering in the chilliness of the air.

The glasses pick up everything, and they pick up at how Eggsy shakes his head, tutting beneath his breath. His latex gloves that he’s just pulled on are sunflower yellow, Merlin notices vaguely, inappropriately happy.

Merlin takes a shuddering breath and keeps his own eyes trained on Eggsy’s face, how he stares down at the mark.

Merlin tries not to think about how this is probably what Eggsy looked like when he tricked the king himself, had made Chester King drink his own poison and then proceeded to stab him in the neck with the same poison trigger with nary a flinch.

His jaw is clenched, hinge sharp enough to cut, and his eyes are empty, thoughtlessly hollow as his lips dragged into a facsimile of a smile that is more of a snarl than anything, too many teeth bared to be anything but, far too dangerous to be _polite_.

Merlin thinks Eggsy Unwin is the monster that Kingsman was always afraid they’d make.

In the back of his mind, Merlin wonders what it says about Kingsman as a whole that thought Eggsy is a monster, they still piteously use him for their own ends.

Instead of picking up the scalpel that Eggsy usually seems to favour on missions like these, he picks up a thin tip sharpie from the inside of his suit, stark black as he crouches nonchalantly between the marks shivering thighs, his trembling legs, tied as they are to the legs of the chair that clangs on the concrete floor of the warehouse.

“ _Have you ever tried to skin somebody alive?”_ Eggsy says, and his voice is wintry. It also doesn’t escape Merlin’s notice that Eggsy’s pronunciation is proper, is clear and crystal cold.. It seems to make things that much more terrifying.

The mark shakes his head violently, terrified.  He’s trembling where he sits, stuck close to a monster of nature’s making that nature is unapologetic about.

Those cold eyes coloured starkly and icy, crinkle a little; if it wasn’t so cruel, so terribly horrible, Merlin would always say they was _beautiful_.

Nothing is beautiful about this.

“ _It’s very hard,”_ Eggsy says, tilting his head. “ _Very few people actually get it right_.”

His voice is calm, clinically serene as he explains, tilting his head on the screen so he looks up into terrified brown eyes, lips stretching into that too many teeth snarl that sends shivers up Merlins spine.

Privately, he thinks that if Eggsy was to look or speak to him like that, Merlin would be paralyzed.

He wonders what if says that he and more than half of Kingsman are utterly terrified of this boy.

He thinks it makes them _very_ smart.

“ _See_ ,” Eggsy starts, and fastens his teeth around the cap of the sharpie, pulling it off sharply and casually spitting it out to the side, careless, like it’s trash.

Just like the mark, Merlin finds himself thinking.

“ _The trick is to not go too deep_ ,” His hand is remarkably and horrifyingly steady as he draws simple black lines around the mans trembling ankle, tickling flesh and bone, his other hand keeping the trembling limb still.

He draws a neatly dotted line up each leg, face slack with concentration as he bends over the man’s knee, cutting a dotted line over each kneecap before continuing up the mans thighs.

Merlin tries not to think of whether Eggsy will actually go through with it.

(He thinks he already knows the answer.)

“ _You have to get a nice, consistent type of cut_ ,” Eggsy educates slowly, and the glass in Merlins’ hand cracks as he tightens his fingers involuntarily. Something rattles in the back of his head, some type of instinct as he stares at Eggsy through the glasses. “ _Keep it clean and simple, steady does the trick_ ,”

He finishes the leg, and Merlin watches with his heart in his throat how Eggsy smiles, incisors glinting in the dim light, teeth unbearably white.

Merlin however, still has the memory of Eggsy, kidnapped for two weeks, turning up at HQ by himself, a one man extraction team, with innumerable injuries and flesh and blood in his teeth and mouth, down his chin.

He sees that in his sleep; wonders how many throats Eggsy tore out with his teeth when he can’t sleep, counts them like morbid little sheep whenever he can’t sleep.

( _One.Two. Three. Four_ -)

“ _Please, please-“_ The man is begging, tugging at the leather restraints, bucking his hips foreward to try and get away. He’s hopeless, utterly helpless in the face of sheer brutality that is Eggsy.

“ _Because,”_ Eggsy continues calmly, raising his voiceover the sobbing of his victim. Because Merlin can no longer delude himself, the man is a victim and Eggsy will be his executioner. “ _You just can’t go digging around there, ‘cause then it’s all blood loss and exsanguination and unconsciousness, and then it’s no fun for me at all,”_

“ _Please,”_ The man shrieks as Eggsy finished the dotted line up his forearm,  going up his forearm with nary a blink. Eggsy only smiles serenely, drawing dotted lines over the ball of the mans shoulders, down his chest in a gentle mockery of a y-incision.

In the back of his mind, swallowing against his digust, Merlin wonders if this was how Harry ever thought his mentee would ever turn out like. Harry was always oblivious, though.

“ _I wonder,”_ Eggsy muses thoughtfully, leaning back a little. He cups the man’s chin in his hand, raising the tear stained face up. “ _D’you think I could take your eyelids off all at once when I do your face?”_

Something seems to break in the man, splintering and snapping and Merlin can feel it in himself as well. Feels how Eggsy is so effortlessly torturing this man, how at _ease_ he is with it. Merlin feels faint, and he knows he has no one to blame because Eggsy Unwin was dealt a shit hand and he came out on top.

Maybe not whole, but he did.

“ _Please_ , _I’ll- I’ll tell you everything, just-please_ ,” The man sobs, slumping over in his tight bonds. His face, Merlin can see, is a pasty white, whiter still against the thin lines of dotted ink over his legs and arms and chest, creeping just up his neck.

Eggsy suddenly softens, and a smile soft as can be spreads across his face.

“ _There now, that wasn’t that bad, wasn’t it?”_ He croons and he lifts a gentle hand to card through the man’s sweat damp hair, disregarding the flinch and how he’s looked at with suspicion and fear. “ _I told you the pain would stop if you just told me what I needed_ ,”

The man flinches back, eyes squinting shut but Eggsy just smiles, teeth covered. He looks gentle, like the soft-faced boy Merlin had had in his office only four hours before, crowing over how Barkimedes, his Venus Fly Trap, was growing and how Eggsy was finally going to beat him at Chess.

Something in Merlin tells him Eggsy already has.

“ _Alright-al-alright_ ,” The man weeps and Eggsy lets go of his chin, letting him slump forward against his binds. He takes deep, ragged breathes, never letting Eggsy out of his sights once more.  “ _France, -France, in an, in an underground bunker in the Messines, the techno-technology is hidden-hidden there,-“_

Eggsy waits for more, patient.

“ _Anything else?_ ” He says softly, and the twist of the sharpie in his hand seems as dangerous as if he’d had a knife in it.

The man keens, drawing back and shaking his head so violently, Merlin is surprised he hasn’t succumbed to whiplash.

“ _That’s all I know, I swear! I swear!”_

“ _Come now, Thomas,_ ” Eggsy purrs, and he surges forward quickly, twisting his hand in Thomas’s short brown hair, yanking his head back and to the side. A neat trail of dotted lines in scatted up the side of Thomas’s convulsing neck.

“ _It’s all I know, everything, I swear! I swear it!_ ,”

“ _Oh but I don’t think so,”_ Eggsy croons, and the light touch of the sharpie against the marks jaw makes him give a sharp whimpering noise in the back of his throat. “ _Tell me names, Thomas, and you won’t lose your skin,”_

“ _I don’t know-I don’t know!”_

“ _Don’t,”_ Eggsy growls, and he tugs Thomas’s head the other side, dotting the sharpie up the opposite line of his neck. “ _Lie to me,_ _tell me the wretched name!”_

 _“I don’t-_ ,”

Eggsy does something then, something Merlin can’t see, but it breaks the man down, makes his screaming and sobbing quieten until all that is left in it’s wake is the scream of a name no one had ever been able to get before.

 _“Gregor Simonva,”_ Is screeched into the air, sobbing and screaming.

Eggsy pours himself back, moving as if like liquid. He’s soft smiles and tender eyes again, tucking the sharpie into his breast pocket.

“ _See now,”_ Eggsy says, and he tucks the tips of his index and middle finger beneath Thomas’s trembling chin and forces his head up. The man looks at him with wide, watery eyes, lips trembling as he stares up at Eggsy, terrified. “ _That wasn’t too bad now, didn’t even have to threaten your cock did I, luv?”_

The man gives a quiet keening noise.

Eggsy gives a quiet laugh, something Merlin has never head before and coldness coils beneath his adams apple. Terror grips him as Eggsy slips away from Thomas, leaving the man hanging there on the wooden chair, hanging on by only his ropes.

He walks slowly around the man, and Merlin watches, cold and still, as Eggsy’s hand drops to his right sleeve, where he keeps a particularly sharp hunting knife that he sharpens whenever he needs to, keeps it in tip top shape.

“ _You did so good, Thomas,”_ Eggsy says, and he comes up behind the man, sliding a hand through his hair, down his cheek, cupping his chin.

“ _It’s a pity, however,”_ Eggsy begins, and  his voice is still so sweet, still so gentle and _tender_ as he continues. “ _That you lost your head_ ,”

Quick as a flash, faster than a bullet Merlin thinks hysterically, Eggsy whips the hunting knife from his sleeve and drags it across Thomas’s throat, from ear to ear with the sort of precision one can only gain from repetition.

Thomas, wide eyed and open-mouthed, gurgles quietly, convulsing under Eggsy’s gentling hands, Eggsy crooning quietly as Thomas stares up at him with wide eyes. His legs twitch and jerk, arms pulling at the rope restraints as blood pours down his throat and over into his chest as he chokes, small sputters of Eggsys codename being forced out in mute plea.

The yellow latex gloves are more red than yellow now.

Merlin doesn’t know who the monster wearing Eggsy’s face is.

–

(He does though.

That’s the worst.)

-


End file.
